Last week the Commission on Unalienable Rights issued its final report. The Commission was created by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in May 2019 to “provide fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.”
It would, Pompeo said, undertake “one of the most profound reexaminations of the unalienable rights in the world since the 1948 Universal Declaration,” as well as “an informed review of the role of human rights in American foreign policy.” He argued that “America’s Founders defined unalienable rights as including ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ They designed the Constitution to protect individual dignity and freedom. A moral foreign policy should be grounded in this conception of human rights.” Yet, Pompeo cautioned against creating new categories of rights, which he argued human rights advocates had pursued: “when politicians and bureaucrats create new rights, they blur the distinction between unalienable rights and ad hoc rights”.
Unalienable and ad hoc
While Pompeo’s creation of the category of “ad hoc rights” itself raises questions, critics raised concerns from the outset that the commission would provide an intellectual argument for a narrow understanding of rights and for undermining rights – indeed, one of the first invited speakers called for protecting an “irreducible minimum” of human rights.
